Author: alucardvred

I have previously worked for IBM and have experienced the culture at the large tech company, so I had a certain idea of what a typical software internship would be like; however, I still started this summer with high expectations of what I wanted to gain from my internship at Apigee. Needless to say, it blew my expectations through the roof!

Although I have had many great experiences with Apigee, the three most memorable takeaways I received from this internship were:

I got to work on a project that played a purpose for Apigee. Apigee did not assign interns to do “intern” work such as making a button for their website. They wanted us to contribute to the success of the company. My partner and I developed a metric correlation tool from scratch, and were able to use tools we definitely would not have learned in school (e.g. Node, Angular, Swagger, etc.). Although these concepts were new at first, our mentors always had time to help, and genuinely wanted us to succeed and learn new things even if we were only at Apigee for a short amount of time.

The idea that you can learn what you want, as long as you have a passion for it. The policy at Apigee is if you want to learn something, or try something new all you have to do is ask a person knowledgeable in it. For example, even if I was an engineering, I could ask someone in the marketing team about best practices and techniques in marketing and they would gladly show me. If I had the passion I could even join the marketing team.

The perks. Oh man were the perks great. Receiving catered lunch on the daily, having legitimate kickboxing classes during lunch, and an espresso machine better than most cafes (of course they were more perks) didn’t exactly make me want to check the clock to leave. Also, our team building events were the best. I can’t really complain about going Go-Karting, Laser Tagging, and playing volleyball with the company (everyone’s friendly, they don’t bite).

All these things contributed to a comfortable environment and the awesome Apigee culture.